A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

When I was reading this book, I kept thinking, damn, Claude was lucky to have been alive when that level of abstraction for information was still there for the taking! Of course, it takes a genius to see that it’s there in the first place—and then to pursue it, formalize it, and actually get the damn thing done.

The book is excellently written and, more than anything else, shows the sheer power of abstraction: stripping away layers of messy, real-world detail until you arrive at something clean enough to reason about mathematically. Shannon looked at information—in all its different forms—and found something underneath it that could be measured, manipulated, and understood.

It left me with that wonderful, slightly frustrating thought: what abstractions are still sitting around us today, hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to notice them?